IBM Informix continues as a force in helping to deliver smarter solutions as the engine that powers OLTP and decision support applications for businesses and partners of all sizes. Take a look at our newest technology and discover unprecedented advantages through advanced levels of performance, availability, and efficiency, with minimal complexity and lower computing costs.

Key Features and Enhancements

Options, not hassles, for achieving continuous availability

IBM Informix offers the industry's most comprehensive set of high availability options that can take advantage of low-cost hardware with Informix Flexible Grid. Schedule upgrades or maintenance when you want, without any downtime, and without having to use temporary hardware or clone your databases and applications. Use different hardware, operating systems, or even different versions of Informix from cluster to cluster within a grid. Scale capacity when and where needed, bring data on or off line, or change your data schema throughout your grid, all on-demand and with no downtime. Easily manage your grid environment from a single location!

Speed and efficiency let you do more and spend less

Informix is fast. Ask any Informix user. Informix was built from the ground up for performance. Higher performance means fewer servers – and less space, power, and cooling resources. Gain even higher throughput using low-cost commodity hardware. It starts with a multi-threaded architecture that optimises the use of the hardware, together with on-going enhancements focused on keeping a performance edge. Deep compression of data, indexes, and blobs reduces storage needs and increases performance. New SQL enhancements allow for much faster business intelligence and enhanced integration with popular BI tools such as Cognos. The strong performance of Informix as a single platform to address OLTP and analytical workloads presents significant value since operations can be consolidated on a single database platform.. Organisations requiring “speed of thought” analysis will benefit from Informix Warehouse Accelerator that leverages an in-memory, columnar approach to accelerate queries up to 100+ times, with no change to business applications and no database tuning required. The new automated partition refresh and trickle-feed features help ensure that the data mart is always current for real-time analytics.

Meet the Big Data challenges of sensor data

Informix, with its TimeSeries feature, helps organisations solve the Big Data challenge of sensor data by providing unprecedented performance and scalability to applications that leverage time series data. And because sensor data often relies on location, Informix offers a built-in spatial feature to enable location-based applications. Applications can also seamlessly combine spatial data with time series data, with no separate license fees or installations required.

Easy administration lets you maximise DBA resources

Informix software automatically senses and responds to changes without human or programmatic intervention. The self-maintaining, self-configuring, and self-healing capabilities include automated storage and memory management, a deployment utility and automated install capable of mass deployment across multiple servers, as well as an automated task scheduler. There is also built-in support for advanced data types including spatial, and time series data.

Increase developer productivity and options

Informix Genero provides easy, graphical tools that increase developer productivity whether the goal is to accelerate a new generation of mobile and cloud-based applications, or to modernise existing 4GL applications. It also delivers increased options and easier enablement of open source applications through increased support for industry standard SQL, new SQL syntax for easier porting of open source applications to Informix, and increased interoperability with open source software. Integration with IBM Optim Development Studio provides visual analysis of SQL statements, execution and performance for faster development and testing of SQL queries, stored procedures and Web Services.

Enhanced security speeds time to compliance

Organisations will have greater control over auditing practices with selective row level auditing. With more granular control, organisations can minimise the performance impact of auditing while simplifying the management and querying of audit records. Additionally, Informix brings trusted context to solution providers to create a trusted connection between the middle tier and the database, together with third-party authentication, greatly simplifying administration.

Helping to reduce the cost and risk of private cloud, Informix 12.1 is the only database that allows different hardware and operating systems from cluster to cluster in a distributed environment. For businesses looking to deploy an Informix-based cloud on an optimised system, the new Informix Hypervisor Edition brings all of the strengths of Informix to IBM PureSystems.